Talk:United States of America/@comment-208.54.5.154-20140127042114/@comment-4391208-20140127064809
I'm not sure what kind of answer you want from me. To me, everyone has a share of the blame. If you want to talk about "evil things", then the East Germans, and to an extent the Soviets, didn't do anything to people outside their nation(s), no matter how they were scheming bastards to their own. And all the nations lost were Warsaw Pact nations; NATO didn't even encounter the BETA on their home ground until past 1980. You know what Soviet leadership is like; you know what Communist leadership in the Eastern Bloc nations were like during the Cold War years. If anything, they'll do all they can to retain their power, and the Warsaw Pact wasn't exactly the international referendum it was made out to be by the Soviets. If you're talking about the espers, then human experimentation went on on both sides during the Cold War, historically speaking; the USA just tended to not do anything more extreme than psych programs because they knew that they wouldn't be able to get away with it (and even them, some of them, in today's perspective, could be considered dangerous). The Soviets had a stronger powerbase and a less-developed commoner class, so they knew they could do the more extreme ends and not have to answer for their deeds. Again, that had little to no impact on the world at large. Both supernations built a fair amount of their medical knowledge on confiscated records of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japanese human experimentations anyway, if there's fault to be laid, how far and how wide should people be implicated in? The PRC's failure at Kashgar was what prompted the USA to adopt their Hive-nuking policy in the first place; as they were not at the Moon during the first few years, you can hardly blame them for underestimating the aliens. I can't imagine the UN/US was very open with their information policy either; not that they had anything to give to the Chinese and Soviets, at least not information that would take them the next thirty years of close contact with the BETA to obtain. Neither had they encountered Laser-class in the anti-air role until Kashgar; had the first Hive landed on US soil, it's up in the air if the USA would have done the same thing as the Chinese did, especially since they had more advanced technology. The Chinese were on equal terms with the BETA land forces until the Lasers showed up. Even Japan has been analysing tech from American hardware and secretly reverse-engineering it for their use via projects like the XFJ Program. Not to mention that they have frequent contact with Soviet forces and even COSEAN forces, neither of which are under US influence. From the US POV, you could even call Japan a dangerous element. The lack of affection the rest of the world's fighting forces have for the USA stems from various reasons, one of them being that the USA is the only faction constantly developing weaponry with dedicated equipment to fight human opponents. The other is their tendency to poke their noses into other people's business even after they previously established that they were not going to be helping; Operation Lucifer, where they landed two G-Bombs on Yokohama, and their development of G-Bombs as the next Alternative Plan and constantly holding concil with the UN to approve theirs, despite the UN already approving Alt. IV, are just two examples. Yeah, sure, from the US POV: "Fuck yeah we just wrecked a Hive!" But from the Japanese POV: "Some fuckers who didn't even participate in the operation just dropped two fucking black hole bombs on us!" Sure, they prevented the operation's collaspe, but they weren't the ones who had to move back into the area to live the rest of their lives out. At least with the BETA, nature can recover land regained from them, with time; with the G-Bombs, no one knows anything about the inhibition their detonation just placed on the surrounding areas. They also didn't participate in the Operation until the last moment, where they basically convinced the UN to let them through long enough to drop two bombs from space. If you really wanted to go further, you could charge them with friendly fire, because there were plenty of people who didn't escape the blast radius in that operation. This is in light of the fact that when the Japanese told them to hold the line one year prior, they basically said "fuck you", packed their bags, and left, burning their own copy of the America-Japanese defence agreement as they did so. Does that make the US evil? Sure, if you're not an American. If you're an American, then the G-Bombs saved the lives of the remaining soldiers, and the breaking of the defence agreement prevented the deaths of American soldiers in a futile land war that they had already experienced once in Europe, covering the NATO retreat, and the Japanese are cowards and idealists for trying to save every piece of their nation; didn't they already learn that from the Eurasian campaign and their paltry stint in China, or are they that stupid? The entirety of Muv-Luv's expanded backstory and settings basically says that everyone has a finger in the blame pie. The Chinese refused UN help until it was too late, the Soviets broke every human rights law in a desperate attempt to salvage their land, the Japanese refusal to deploy nuke prior to the Battle of Kyoto is why their capital forces got their shit screwed fifty ways into next year... and so on and so forth. I don't really see how the Americans are protrayed any more evil or less than their counterparts. If they went through all the trouble to set themselves up as Big Brother for the Western Blocs, then it's kind of hard not to meddle in other people's business when other people keep coming to them for help. Even if other nations are the ones behind all the frontline fighting, they can't just justify to the public that they need to up and move their entire army to the frontlines; those American soldiers are also someone's sons/daughters. Of course they'd want to keep their own power intact; if the Soviets got a bloody nose from bashing their head against the BETA, that's hardly reason enough for the USA to emulate them "just to be equal". They have refugees that enlisted for citizenship; well, of course, is the American industry supposed to fire one of their factory workers just to make space for them? I don't really see any of the characters having trouble or actively hating on Americans. Jokes like "they can't do close combat" or "'Murican TSFs, watch them fart some shots and make a U-turn" are the equivalent of real-world jibes like "how many fucking scopes, rails, shottys, launchers, and grips are you going to put on your fucking M4?" Jibes are jibes, but no one is really painting the Americans as the root of all evil that needs to be exterminated. If there was a source to direct the hatred to, it would really only be to their leadership, because the characters, so far as I've seen, don't seem to have an issue with rank and file. Yuuya's racism? Small time, the Soviets did it with their satellite states too, boo hoo.